Elegies to the Third International (original) (raw)
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Eiffel Tower Through The Eyes of Painters
The Eiffel Tower, the global icon of France, was erected as the entrance to the Paris International Exposition in 1889. It was a suitable centrepiece for the World Fair, which celebrated the centennial of the French Revolution. Although the tower was a subject of controversy at the time of its construction, many European painters have been inspired by the majestic figure of the Eiffel Tower. They picturised the tower in their portraits and cityscapes. Paul Louis Delance, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and Henri Rousseau were the first artists to depict this symbol of modernity. Robert Delaunay and Marc Chagall used the image of the tower most frequently. Maurice Utrillo, Raoul Dufy, Fernand Léger, Diego Rivera, Max Beckmann and Christian Schad can also be counted among the artists who picturised the tower. The Eiffel Tower appears differently in the eyes of pointillist, expressionist, orfist, cubist and abstract painters. Keywords: Eiffel Tower, European art, painting.
The Tower: Tatlin's Monument to the Third International
The debate on the question of monumental art was the first major clash between the avant-garde and the Bolshevik regime. This was not at all accidental since at the time, when cinema was a little more than a new-born baby and television only a dream, monuments were considered the form of art that inherently touched the greatest number of people, especially in a country with such a percentage of illiterates as Russia, and therefore, had the highest value as political propaganda. The controversy was originated by the different way in which the avant-garde understood to realize the famous Leninist Plan of Monumental Propaganda. The embryo of the plan was the SOVNARKOM's Decree On the Dismantling of Monuments Erected in Honor of the Czars and their Servants and on the Formulation of Projects of Monuments to the Russian Socialist Revolution, promulgated on April 12, 1918. 1 The project, a personal initiative of Lenin, probably inspired by Tomasso Campanella's The City of the Sun, stipulated the erection of monuments of great revolutionary figures of all times and outstanding personalities of mankind's cultural history. The list, strangely eclectic, naturally included Marx, Engels, Spartacus, Garibaldi, Bakunin, Robespierre, Blanqui and Babeuf, but one could also find the names of Voltaire, Heine, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky and Scriabin, or even that of the 15 th century Russian icon painter Andrei Rublev. These monuments had to replace the older ones that were deeply resented as the symbol of the Past: The monuments of generals, of princes, of the lovers of Czarina and the Czar's mistresses Continue to press with their heavy and indecent foot on the throat of the new life. 2 However, if Lenin was primarily interested in the plan's political impact, with its immediate agitating effects, the avant-garde saw it in a much more complex light. They approached the Leninist plan not only as a matter us subject choice but mainly as a new and difficult artistic problem, requiring complicated formal research. In a lecture of December 1918, Mayakovsky stated it in a clear manner:
2012
History is not data but conquest, renewed in time and space by a thorough knowledge, unceasingly continued, unceasingly supplemented. This is indeed the lesson which we must learn from Paris-Moscow'. In these words Pontus Hultén introduced, in his lead article in Les Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne, the project of the Paris-Moscow exhibition, organised in the spring of 1979 at the Centre Pompidou. At the crossroad of the exhibition's main axes sat an object undoubtedly invested with the spirit of 'conquest' which motivated Pontus Hultén as an art historian: the Model of the Monument to the Third International by Vladimir Tatlin. This lost work has been reconstructed several times and each artefact synthesises and formalises a different state of knowledge in a given form and time. Pontus Hultén has been a major protagonist in at least two of these reconstructions. Various exhibitions justified their production, a recurrent circumstance in the history of replicas and reconstitutions of twentieth-century works of art. With Malevich, Tatlin was the principal artist to benefit from the rediscovery and rehabilitation of the Russian avant-gardes carried out by Hultén with the help of Willem Sandberg, the director of the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam and Troels Andersen, the Danish historian. With Andersen, Hultén, then director at the Moderna Museet of Stockholm, conceived a retrospective of Tatlin's work which opened its doors in the summer of 1968. The retrospective was based on research Andersen undertook mainly through T.M. Shapiro, one of Tatlin's assistants for the construction of the first Model of the Monument to the Third International in Pétrograd in 1919-20. Hultén wished to resuscitate one of the symbols of the Revolution in Russian art and society: 'For the first time, it seemed possible that an artist-engineer materialises the synthesis of architecture and sculpture.' Perceived as the outcome of Tatlin's spatial experiments which began in 1913 and his first Counter-Reliefs, the Monument was also the prototype for many examples of monumental architecture of propaganda commissioned by the Bolsheviks to glorify the Revolution. Although never built, this 400 metre-high tower of glass and steel spanning the Neva was to rise in a slope of two latticed spirals in which four geometrical volumes were meant to be superimposed (a cube, a pyramid, a hemisphere and a cylinder) rotating on their own axis. On 8 November, 1920, the anniversary of the Revolution, Tatlin exhibited a five-metre high model in his 'space, materials and construction workshop'. One month later, for the VIIIth Soviet Congress, he relocated it to the Trade Union House in Moscow. For the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts held in Paris Tatlin built a smaller tower (approximately three metres high), whose spirals looked radically different from the first model. These two original 'towers' have been lost. Two drafts and three photographs of the first model published in 1921 with the text 'Tatlin against Cubism' by Nicolaï Punin, along with indications provided by Shapiro, were originally the only material brought to the historian Ulf Linde and the artist Per Olof Ultveldt, in charge of the reconstruction of the Stockholm 'tower'. A 1:10 scale model had been initially produced. Then, the study of a photograph of the 1925 model, together with a high-angle view of the top of the first 'tower' under construction, improved knowledge of Tatlin's architectonic system. These new elements helped the construction of the wood and iron full-scale model built by carpenters Arne Holm and Eskil Nandorf and ironworker Henrik Östberg. The satisfaction of Hultén and Andersen was considerably tempered by the difficulties they encountered with Russian museums when negotiating loans requested for the retrospective. The discussions ended in March TATE'S ONLINE RESEARCH JOURNAL
“Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture, 1915–1935” Review Essay.
Design Issues , 2012
Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Costakis Collection. Curators: MaryAnne Stevens (Royal Academy) and Maria Tsantsanoglou (Costakis Collection) with the collaboration of photographer Richard Pare Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935, sets out to examine the Avant-Garde period in Russian/Soviet 1 architecture through the correlation of artists' research into three-dimensional construction within the picture plane, and the actual architectural constructions that emerged in the period. These relationships are proposed by means of three concurrent narratives: Richard Pare's large format colour photographs of still remaining works of architecture in Russia and other parts of the former USSR, records from the period including small black and white photographs, displayed horizontally and twinned with each of Pare's photographs, and a selection of Constructivist drawings, paintings and architectural designs drawn from the Costakis collection. The drawings and paintings selected from the Costakis collection show a development from early geometric compostions, where we are invited to make connections between, for example, Rodchenko's circular Linearism,1920, and Shukhov's telescoping Radio Tower, to more speculative experiments in construction, for example, Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (model re-created in the Royal Academy courtyard), Lissitzky's Monument to Rosa Luxemburg, and Klucis' designs for propaganda kiosks, which integrate typography into architectural design.
Framing the Eiffel Tower: From postcards to Postmodernism by Sonya Stephens
The visual impact, and iconic status, of the Eiffel Tower have long been established. Indeed, it was conceived as both a monumental sight and as a place for viewing, and so its place in visual culture, it might be argued, was a very part of the Tower's conception in 1884, long before a committee had even been formed to select a centerpiece for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Recent innovations in a range of fields, including cultural geography and visual culture, have led scholars to reflect on what constitutes an urban icon, to question that which is precisely the 'visual' in urban culture, and to propose that 'the Eiffel Tower is actually the original and defining urban icon'.
The Art of the Revolution Will Be Internationalist
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 2018
A study of the tradition of Cuban political posters and cultural internationalism, with a focus on the prodution of the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL). OSPAAAL emerged from the 1966 conference, serving as a key bridge across anti-imperialist and anti-colonial liberation movements of the three continents. One of the primary projects of OSPAAAL was its publications: the monthly news-oriented Tricontinental Bulletin and the bi-monthly Tricontinental Magazine, which was more analytical and theoretical in nature. Since its inception, Tricontinental has produced an estimated total of nine million posters distributed to sixty countries. This number becomes even more impressive considering the material scarcities imposed by the economic blockade set by the United States, and upheld by its ally Israel, which has repressed the island since the Revolution. Español: https://thetricontinental.org/es/el-arte-de-la-revolucion-sera-internacionalista/ Português: https://thetricontinental.org/pt-pt/dossie-15-a-arte-da-revolucao-sera-internacionalista/ Français: https://thetricontinental.org/fr/lart-de-la-revolution-sera-internacionaliste/ 中文：https://thetricontinental.org/zh/huibian-15-gemingdeyishu/
Framing the Eiffel Tower: From postcards to Postmodernism
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